Berwyn Fire Company
Berwyn Fire Company
Berwyn Fire Company
Berwyn Fire Company


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Blazing New Trails
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By Bob Byrne, Editor INCOMMUNITY Magazine
September 20, 2014

Mary Ellen Toscani is Berwyn Fire Company's Firefighter of the Year

Mary Ellen Toscani meets a lot of strangers in her line of volunteer work. "Usually when we are seeing people it's on the worst day of their life - auto accidents or bad things like that." Rarely is it in a situation when they would choose. That's because Toscani, 25, is a volunteer firefighter with the Berwyn Fire Company. If you ever find yourself having a bad day like that, Toscani is the kind of person you want to meet.

She was recently voted Berwyn Fire Company's 2014 Firefighter of the Year by her peers. It's an honor that Berwyn Chief Eamon Brazunas says is not automatically given out each year. It is awarded by a vote of every volunteer and career member of the company. For her part Toscani, who started at age 16, says she was genuinely surprised to receive an honor. "I had no idea. I know I had been more active with the fire company this year. We did our whole Confined Space Rescue (CSR) certification, which was Thursday and every Saturday for a few months in the winter last year so it was a big commitment."

Training, preparation and dedication were big factors in the votes of some senior members of the Berwyn Fire Company. One long-time volunteer says Toscani has been a mentor to younger members and is dedicated to training and to her community.

Toscani first volunteered as a Junior Firefighter as part of a club at Conestoga High School. After graduation from Conestoga and while attending college in upstate New York, she kept up with the fire company training and volunteer hours while home on vacation in Berwyn. She graduated from college in 2011 and has been commuting between her job as a media strategist in Philadelphia to Berwyn for several years. "I live in the city but I'm rethinking that. After school I wanted to do the whole city thing but I'm back here three nights a week. We have Monday night drills, Thursday meeting nights and then on weekends there's always something going on. Always standbys or trainings to do so I'm around here a lot."

The youngest of three children, her dad's an attorney and her mom is a teacher in Paoli.

"I try not to tell my parents everything I do on the job because they'll get a little nervous," Toscani says. "But they come here for the open house in October. One year I was on the front of the hose for the house burning demonstration and we had poured a lot of diesel fuel on it. So there was a really big fireball coming over my head. They were a little 'eeehhhh, ummmm, what!?"

So I don't tell them too much, but now they just know. They understand that when (I'm at their house and) it's three o'clock in the morning and they hear me running downstairs they know where I'm going so they just trust me and they've very supportive."

When she's not volunteering as a firefighter, Toscani devotes her free time to helping save the lives of firefighters. "I also volunteer for a non-profit organization called "The First Twenty, which is dedicated to firefighter health and wellness in Narberth, Pa. It's dedicated to reducing the number of line-of-duty deaths due to heart attacks, which is the number-one killer in firefighter line-of-duty deaths. It's an avoidable statistic that is a factor of nutrition, fitness and mental wellness."

Toscani and two other firefighters have been working to bring the lessons and practices from First Twenty to the Berwyn Fire Company. "That's what we are trying to implement here in a wellness program. It's an online and mobile app that's made for firefighters so it's accessible 24 hours a day. It's nutrition, mental wellness and fitness so it's a full triangular thing."

Training is a hallmark of the way things operate at Berwyn. All volunteer fire companies that serve the area invest time and money in training. At Berwyn, one newer training area has been Confined Space Rescue (CSR). Toscani says it's an area where size is an asset. At five-foot, six inches and a slender but muscular frame she can get into some places that might be a bigger challenge for someone who is six feet tall and 200 pounds. "That is one area where my size might be an advantage. Sometimes in a rescue situation I can squeeze into a hole, I can squeeze into a window to unlock a door. I can do things that bigger people can't."

It may also be the one area where being a woman comes into play. Toscani points out that it's important for every firefighter to do their best, regardless of gender. "I work out. It's important as a firefighter. I owe it to my other members. If I go in with them on a hose team, if they fall down or get hurt I need to be able to pull them out. I have different strategies for carrying someone who's six feet tall and 200 pounds. I have trained and found different things I can do to get them out. I have different styles of carries that work for me just so I know that if I go in with somebody I can get them out and I can get myself out to make sure we keep everybody safe at the end of the day."

While her title is "firefighter", Toscani trains in many different roles. It's the culture of the Berwyn Fire Company to have as many members be a fully trained as possible. "I'm a firefighter (but) we all train on the ambulances. We take fire trucks for cardiac arrest calls. The new approach to CPR is compressions only (no mouth-to-mouth). It's 200 rapid compressions so you need people to cycle through that. We bring a crew on a fire truck so that we can keep giving the person compressions and it gives them the best chance to be revived. At auto-accidents we offer extra hands to the EMTs."

Training and serving the community come first at the fire station. While there is a social aspect and camaraderie that naturally occurs, Chief Brazunas says that being prepared for any kind of call and serving the community is "job one." Brazunas cites Toscani as just one of dozens of examples of volunteers who save the communities they serve very significant amounts of money each year. The chief estimates that it would cost about $100,000 to hire and train someone with the kind of training and service time Toscani has under her belt. She has been volunteering for nine years. Other members have been volunteering and training much longer.

One of the most dangerous situations Toscani recalls was being in a carriage house fire where the ceiling collapsed, raining fire down on the firefighters. There was a problem with pumping water into the building and the signal sounded to get out of the building and fight the blaze from outside. "That was a little heart-racing but we train so much here that you don't want to get complacent. Every fire is different but we are around each other and we train so much that we trust each other and we trust our training that we try to be ready for whatever is coming our way."

Inevitably the questions about being about being a woman come up. While she didn't train to address the subject, Toscani takes a gender neutral approach. "Some people don't get it and they ask what it's like to be a female firefighter. I get it - they want to know what it's like to be a woman in a 'male's world' I guess. I just see it as what's it like to be a firefighter. We all have strengths and weaknesses. There are short firefighters, tall firefighters, big, skinny...and it's just important for every firefighter to focus on their strengths, try to improve on their weaknesses and always to improve yourself. There's never a point, no matter how old you are or how experienced you are, where you can sit back and say, 'Oh I'm good. I've got it' because that's the time when you get yourself in trouble."

The Berwyn Fire Company is one of the busiest in the region. The brutal winter of 2014 made February the busiest month ever for the company, with close to 400 fire and EMS incidents in that one month alone. Is it ever too much? Toscani says she still loves volunteering to help others. "Last winter when we had that ice storm, we ran calls for what seemed like three days straight. I got on the first truck for a call at about 3 a.m. and didn't get off until 7 p.m. that night. And it was a long day. I think one of my captains put it best when he posted 'Being a volunteer firefighter stopped being fun four days ago,' and that was during the storm. I think we all have those moments and then you have to remind yourself that I signed up for this to serve the public. I want to do it, I do it for the people of Berwyn, I do it because I like helping people and even though we may be going to hundreds of wires calls (during an ice storm), I still really love what I do. I think it's important to just remember that."

And like so many first responders who serve the community, Toscani says she has great support from those closest to her. "My boyfriend is a naval aviator who graduated from the Naval Academy and has been in Pensacola, Fla., for a year which is hard. But it's nice in a way because I stay so busy around here and he's so busy down there. We share all our stories and he's very supportive of me being in the fire company. He thinks it's really cool and so that's really nice."

Volunteers are required to train a certain number of hours and respond to a minimum number of calls. Being a volunteer firefighter, EMT or other first responders takes dedication, often for little thanks. "We're here to fight fires so when we get calls you get amped up but it's important to remember that it's also somebody's house, it's the worst day of their life. So [we have to think], "Let's put all our training together and do the best we can to help these people."

Toscani admits that "it's nice when people come up to us and thank us. People do thank us even when their house has caught on fire. Obviously it's not our fault, but we do get compliments and thank-yous every once in a awhile and that's kind of nice. We don't expect it and you can't go in expecting it."

You can help support the Berwyn Fire Company or your local volunteer fire company. Berwyn's 2014 Firefighter of the Year suggests that donating money always helps. We always need financial support. We just sent out a bunch of protective gear to get patched up and that costs money. Some people think we have an infinite supply of funds from somewhere, like the state. We have really nice fire trucks but if you see out firehouse it's really old and kind of falling apart. Liking us on social media and spreading it so that people can see what we're doing also helps."

Chief Brazunas agrees that financial donations are important. He points out that people often don't know that volunteer fire companies are not fully funded by the municipalities they serve and that donations and fundraising are critical to providing their service.

Read more about how to support the fire companies that serve Easttown and Tredyffrin online at BerwynFireCo.org, PaoliFireCompany.org, and RadnorFire.com.

Source: INCOMMUNITY Magazine https://www.in-philly.com - Easttown & Tredyffrin Fall 2014 - Bob Byrne, Editor


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